"I still don't understand why lookers-on of battle try to use words to tell what they've seen. Or why I do. You don't remember the things of war with the part of your being that forms and chooses words. It's not that the brain forgets. Mine remembers that during the daylight hours of [Iwo Jima's] D Day plus 6 and D Day plus 7, the U.S.S. Samaritan took aboard 551 critically wounded Marines, a hundred more than the ship had been built to carry.
"But it's my stomach that remembers how
the ship smelled. It still could
tell the difference between the orthopedic wards aboard where there
always was plaster dust in the air from the fresh casts, and one of the
wards for abdominal injuries, where the smell was of decomposing flesh.And it's my ears that remember the ceaseless surge of small boat engines beside us as they delivered up their loads. They still know an Amtrac from an LCVP, the small Higgins boat with the ramp for a bow. They know the human noises masked by that sound, the curses and commands and breathing of the seamen carrying stretchers hour after hour. And
how
people sound when they are hurting terribly."It's my feet that remember the blood. A pool of blood was something a man left behind him on the deck like his gun and his pack. The important thing about the blood was that it was slippery under your feet, and you had to be careful if you were standing in it not to fall down when the ship rolled.
"None of these impressions, though, is as unfading as what the heart remembers...."
~ Written by a woman who was there. And never forgot.
